I am personally rather indifferent to the whole GW/AGW affair. That said, it's just silly to infer that extra snow means the globe isn't warming. For example, consider: if 100 billion tons of ice melts at the poles, and global snow levels then increase, in winter, when was the water cooler: 1) when it spent all year round being ice, or 2) when it spends 4 months a year as ice? If you guessed #1, you'd be right.

Of course, I can ask the question a different way, and just make you mental. If the globe is warming, and the average temperature goes up, would it be possible for the increased water vapor as it traveled across the poles to actually generate an expanding ice sheet? If you agreed that it was possible, you'd be right.

Now the part that will make you mental is that these two questions imply answers that could be superficially viewed as contradictory. I'm fun at a party, eh?

That said, it's just silly to infer that extra snow means the globe isn't warming.

Indeed. In the process of joining conclusions backwards to supporting evidence, may denialists indeed use such an argument. The smart ones move onto smarter arguments, but nothing that hasn't already been definitively answered for someone willing to look.

Political reasoning is abhorrently dishonest, even in really smart people. Curiously enough, the mind prevents us from seeing just how dishonest we are being with ourselves. We really could solve our problems with politics didn't involve so much head-in-ass time.

Political reasoning is abhorrently dishonest, even in really smart people. Curiously enough, the mind prevents us from seeing just how dishonest we are being with ourselves.

In my mind it's all about confirmation bias. Which is to say, when confronted with a larger list of facts to assess, human beings have a remarkable ability to select only a small subset of the facts and use those to confirm their beliefs. I encountered this last year. I will relay the anecdote.

Sometime last year a study came out that "proved" that caffeine drinkers who regularly drink caffeine induce no practical effect to themselves, and only restore themselves to what would be a baseline level. Over a twenty year period I have read summaries on many, many caffeine studies. This particular study stood alone as an outlier in a much larger field of study. I noted this with amusement and went on with my life.

One day not so long later, I was getting coffee at work. A coworker of mine intruded to attempt to tell me about the study. I cut him off cold, and was quite irritated. This coworker was Mormon. I did not need to mire in the narrowly minded comfort-confirmed mentality of someone who is able to learn nothing else. It's just sad, really.

Of course on the subject of global warming, the issue is political. I once heard a great definition of politics, once: "politics is who gets what". It's true. While politics is about many things, it's certainly about resource allocation, and when you consider it from that perspective, and decide to tolerate the notion that for human beings resource allocation will always be highly contentious, what you will do is become a bit jaded like me, which is to say, unsurprised, disdainful, and accepting of the ugliness of politics all at the same time.

Sure but the crops that grow here in Costa Rica have adapted to the pests and disease over a long time. We don't know if they will be able to survive after sudden changes in weather patterns and new pests and diseases or what it will cost us to help them survive.

This year the dry season was like one month shorter. An extra month of rain each year is no fun and it can cause even more flooding which has reduced crop output in past years. But then last year we had record droughts which reduced output from hydr

The time between peak temperatures can be used to measure climate change. Global warming is expected to decrease those times. Since it was 12 years since the hottest year on record, the next value might be 7 years, then 5 years, and so on. Without climate change those times would be a function of the length of recorded temperatures and would usually increase in duration as more data was recorded (40 yrs to 50 years to 80 years, etc.).

Random deviations in a chaotic system (like weather) are not bound to any duration. All you know is that random deviations have a finite duration, it can be arbitrarily long (including effectively infinite, meaning until the end of the earth).

It is saddening that people are even arguing this. You don't grasp the complexity of the problem. The reason we believe global warming occurs is that many different readings -not all- point in the same direction. All measurements, regardless of their duration are subject to random deviations, which by definition have random durations. Some probably have durations measured in millions of years.

Climate is a different story and can be quantifiable to the extent that effects such as El Nino were identified over a century ago.What is your motivatation to mislead with irrelevant rubbish such as you posted above? Just because there is noise in a system does not mean the system does not exist.

The above was implying that trends should be completely ignored in systems where there is some noise (which is what I was trying to say above in the portion you quoted). There's no point trying to dignify it with specifics such as those you've given that the above poster would never have thought of. I don't think he's even using the same definition of chaos, he's only trying a petty little trick to suggest that all of the data is worthless.

It just presents the data and does not surmise anything about the causes or what should be done about it."

Let me fill in the blanks for you. It's getting warmer because of anthropogenic carbon emissions. And no matter what you think should be done about it, nothing is going to be done about it because people are not going to agree on a common course of action.

So, better get used to it: it's going to get a lot warmer. But why that may be unpleasant and costly for some, it's not going to be the end of civilization.

What are you talking about? 500 ppm is pretty much inevitable at this point. IPCC predictions go as high as 900ppm in 2090 and even the IPCC doesn't predict the end of civilization at that level. In fact, even in the absolute worst case scenario, namely total melting of all ice caps over a few centuries (and that's how long it's going to take no matter what), how do you imagine that would end civilization?

"just" makes it sounds like thats a bad thing. That's excellent science. Professional and respectable and my hats off to Dr Masters

Part 2

and does not surmise anything about the causes

Well, I think there's little disagreement that a "large" fraction is human caused, although obviously some small fraction is natural variation. "natural climate" is not a flat horizontal line as some demand.

Part 3

or what should be done about it.

Excellent. Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime, or national socialism, or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness".

I'm opposed to most of those solutions, along with a HUGE percentage of people who are in, or in my case have been abandoned by, the Republican party. Despite my/our disagreement being with Part 3, we get slandered and our words are twisted around into being deniers of Part 1 or Part 2. Very annoying. I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.

"Well, I think there's little disagreement that a "large" fraction is human caused, although obviously some small fraction is natural variation."

I don't know whether this is disingenuous or you just don't understand.

The whole reason there even exists controversy about this in the first place, is that the signal is very small in relation to the noise: any human-caused differences are so small in relation to the natural variations that it has been nearly impossible to detect (if, indeed, it has actually been detected).

"some small fraction is natural..." is not the real situation at all. The problem is the opposite: the vast majority of it is natural. Any scientist, even the staunchest AGW supporter, will admit that if he/she has any pretension to honesty at all.

That's a nice, concise explanation. While that seems to be intuitive for many, it's never made sense to me. I find human-generated noise often deafening.

Billions of people extracting carbon from the bowels of the earth and shooting it by the ton into the sky, year after year, decade after decade, seems more or less competitive with, say, a volcanic eruption here and there.

I'll leave the numbers to the professionals, but I can't buy the 7-billion-people-h

Either cite your sources or take your disinformation elsewhere Jane. The IPCC and NAS both claim greater than 50% of the variation is human caused, the natural part has a very slight downward trend over the last century, the upward AGW signal dominates the historical trend, it even obscures the significant cooling signal coming from sulphurous smog.

Pretentions of honesty: Looking at the rest of the innane comments in this story, it's clear to me that slashdot has upset the Heartland Institue with yesterd

"The IPCC and NAS both claim greater than 50% of the variation is human caused, the natural part has a very slight downward trend over the last century, the upward AGW signal dominates the historical trend, it even obscures the significant cooling signal coming from sulphurous smog."

Great. But I'm not arguing with you about that. At least here and now. But it has next to nothing to do with what I was saying. Apples and oranges. THIS is what I was saying:

The fact that any AGW climate signal has been small in relation to the noise (natural variation) is one of the most very fundamental aspects of the science, and therefore of the whole problem. If you do not recognize at least that much, you have no place arguing about science at all.

"Yes, we know WUWT fans such as yourself place a low value on "understanding the actual science", so much so that you haven't even bothered to link to the graph your banging on about. I can't prove you're an astroturfer, but I see this particular debating tactic as inconclusive evidence for the affirmative."

I am not a "fan" of any site, pro or con. And you can take your personal remarks and stuff them. Further, I wasn't commenting about any particular graph, but in fact the majority of them in regard to AGW... if they contain any error margin information at all. And if you really know much of anything about AGW, then you already know this. I don't see you trying to refute it. You'd rather cast aspersions on my personally. But then, we already knew that.

"I can't prove you're an astroturfer, but I see this particular debating tactic as inconclusive evidence for the affirmative."

You can't prove I'm an astroturfer because I'm not an astroturfer. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

And I can't prove you're a vindictive asshole with an axe to grind in regard to me, either. But then, I really don't need to. I'll let others decide just how obvious that is.

"Humans releases more gas then can be absorbed in the same time period as the release."

Yes, we know that. Nobody I know of is disputing that. It's not even part of the debate. But by itself it doesn't mean anything. The question is: what are the consequences?

As for "cycles", though, we don't know that much about them yet, for one thing. And for another, the "cycle" you are referring to are sun cycles, and the fact that the temperature has deviated from following those cycles in the last few decades, which is true, can also be very misleading. Especially considering all the BS that is said

"Forget what's posted on blogs and social sites, go browse the wealth of material provided by the IPCC, or NAS, or the Royal society, or CSIRO, or NASA, or NOAA, or WMO or any other reputable and independent scientific institution, even the WP page on AGW is informative for this purpose."

Or not.

Before we go about talking about how "independent" these sources are, we should look a little closer at the facts. And among those facts, you will find that the majority of research papers supporting the AGW concept have shared either data or methodology with the folks at Hadley Centre and CRU. And yes, that includes NASA, and NOAA, and very definitely the IPCC.

The fact is that the "climate science" community is very small, close, and insular. You will find that most researchers have either co-authored papers, or referenced each others' papers in their own papers. It is a very incestuous field.

In any case, one must be careful about willy-nilly tossing about words like "independent". Due to its small size, globally climate science researchers are scarcely independent at all, compared to most disciplines.

Hahaha.This is one of my most favorite bogus arguments, because it's so easy to show how bogus it really is.

Turn a surface burner on your stove to medium-high. Then put a pan half-full of water on it. LEAVE IT for a while. Guess what? The water continues to get hotter, even though you haven't turned the heat up. If you let it get near boiling, then turn it down just a minor notch or two (as the sun has turned down, just a bit), guess what? The water continues to get hotter.

"Either that or you think the Earth is going to keep getting hotter until it reaches the temperature of the sun, which is ludicrously stupid."

I never stated or implied any such thing.

The point here is that the sun is just coming out of a period in which more than one of its major cycles coincided, which has been a larger-than-normal input. When you combine that with the incidences of El Nino events, it is not so surprising that we have continued to warm. Here is an example.

However, I was not here to try to prove that this is the explanation. Rather, what I was pointing out is that the counterargument (it must be human because it hasn't foll

I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.

So you pretend to be an idiot in the hopes that it will make people take you seriously? I'd like to see that work.

What's wrong with, "It's happening, but there's no viable solution (yet) to stop it?" At least then you have people focused on solutions instead of wasting their time providing more and more proof that it's actually happening.

I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.

Yeah, so this isn't very productive. Maybe try to figure out which solutions are actually good and push for those? Remember, problems don't go away when we don't like the solutions.

Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime, or national socialism, or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness".

I'm curious incidentally which solutions you think fall into these categories. I agree that quite a bit falls into the feel good frippery category. Godwin's law aside, last I checked no one was advocating large scale genocide as a solution. At the very minimum, burning people in ovens would make more CO2.

Well, I think there's little disagreement that a "large" fraction is human caused... I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.

Read any story touching in any way on global warming, including this one, and you will see an enormous body of comments claiming quite seriously than it isn't happening, and another enormous body of comments claiming that if it is happening then humans have little or nothing to do with it. You will also hear such statements many other places, including on the floor of the US Congress. If these are all trolls, then they're surely part of the best-organized and most subtle trolling campaign in history, with

Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime, or national socialism, or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness".

[...]

Despite my/our disagreement being with Part 3, we get slandered and our words are twisted around

YOU get slandered? Wow, how hard that must be for you. If only those Nazi libs knew what it felt like to be slandered, I'm sure they'd never do it you again.

By the way, the Pol Pot talking point is one that you might want to reconsider. It makes you sound like a foaming rabies case. Why parrot all the other fringe Repubs when there are plenty of other socialists both real and fictional to pick from?

Sure, and it is a valid point when one has a few weeks of cold or even a few months of cold. And by the same token, a year like this one by itself isn't that useful data. It is when data like this year is part of a larger pattern that it becomes a problem. In this context one has a very hot year by a variety of different metrics and that's on top of a gradual increase in average temperature over the last twenty years. Weather and climate are different, but lots of weather change over the long-term is eventually a sign of climate change.

Reports like this are like a tin can on a fence for anti global warming people. At the time I write this, I see dozens of posts saying "and now all the global warming people will take this as proof", and not one global warming person taking it as proof.

For the record, this is not proof of global warming. It is a very extreme regional climate event of the type that climate change theory predicts will become common, but you can't attribute individual events to the long-term trend.

For the record, this means jack diddly in terms of global temperature change, the contiguous US is too small to matter. The past 3 months did not set a global record. However, it has been pretty warm: global temperature this year so far is in the top 25%... just like every other year this century.

We've had unusually warm or record warm years for 12 to 15 years. There's evidence of it going back to the early 80s. So far it's following the predicted pattern, there's that nasty science, including the southwest being more mild. A shift in the jet stream was supposed to keep Arizona and Southern California mild compared to the rest of the country. Arizona has had a mild winter and now we are well into May with no 100 degree days. Some would call this proof global warming or climate change is false but it's due to the fact they haven't read what the models predicted. I've heard ridiculous claims that it was supposed to be 10 degrees warmer by now so it's false. I never read a single model that predicted that. The worst scenarios are for a roughly 10 degree increase in some areas in a hundred years, not ten. Three to five was the most likely outcome but we are actually running on the high side of all the models so it's likely to be worse than the best case scenario. Look at the statistics. If some one rolled ten or twelve sixes in a row with dice and could predict 90% of his rolls would that be proof of psychic powers? I think even James Randi would accept that as proof. We're seeing the same consistency in weather model predictions. People have claimed the lack of killer hurricanes as proof that it's all a lie while ignoring the explosion in deadly tornadoes. Also tornadoes are happening earlier and later in the year and they are happening from Maine to Southern California. Two places where they are very rare. Other factors can moderate hurricanes but tornadoes are cause by the mixing of warm and cool air. You have the right conditions you tend to get tornadoes. Usually there's only a portion of the country where conditions are right but now they can happen almost anywhere.

It was a very pleasant year. A gentle winter. Years like this come around time to time. So do nasty winters like the three where we had temperatures of under -25ÂF for weeks on end. Then there was the year where it snowed here every month, including June, July and August. Nasty. These things happen. According to recorded history they've been happening for millennia. According to studies of other things these warming and cooling cycles have been happening for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, traditionally, the Earth has been warmer than it is now. In fact, live and diversity flourished during the warming periods. People are upset because things are changing and they don't like change. Life is change. Change is life.

All of this global warming hysteria is distracting people from the real issue: pollution.

It's not the change, it's the rate of change. Think of it this way, would you rather slow your car from highway speeds by applying the brakes or hitting a brick wall?

The primary uncertainties include not knowing for sure how well our staple crops will adapt to new climate conditions, how populations will adapt to higher sea levels, and how ocean acidification will affect fisheries. It took thousands of years to domesticate and adapt crops to our current conditions. If there's a serious decline in crop pr

I think we are in the interesting part of Climate change right now. Energy levels (not temperature) have increased dramatically in a rather short time and the climate is trying to find a place for all that extra energy now. So the oceans are cycling rapidly (Nina/Nino phases), precipitation levels etc are changing. In essence we're cycling rapidly between extremes. Anecdotally in Utah, last year we had the largest snows on record, and this year is probably the driest on record. For my entire childhood (I'm nearly 40) these cycles were nearly a decade long now they are a cycling in a year.

This will probably continue for a decade or three as the system tries to stabilize the energy levels and sink some of the temperature increase into the oceans, etc. The models aren't perfect and the deniers point to that, but the reality is we simply don't know how the climate will stabilize these energy levels, we can only make predictions based on previous climates we have rudimentary knowledge of. I'll likely be dead long before the worst of climate change hits (major shifts in breadbasket areas), but I know I'm going to live during the most erratic climate change this world's ever seen.

The scariest part to me is how to plan for the future because there is one thing the models do predict and that's the bad weather (the kind that kills people) is going to increase dramatically. I was hoping the SW would get wetter as the models predict but it appears, at least during my lifetime, things are just going to get more erratic making it very difficult to predict and manage scarce water resources.

The funniest part about Climate Change and the Deniers is that the government is planning for it. The military and defense planners and many others are planning for summers where the Arctic passage that's never existed becomes a reality. And before people say this is because of Obama I'll point out this planning started under GW Bush. Those in the know and with power and influence are causing our government to react like Climate change is not only a reality but something that's very important strategically including how to get to all that oil that's in the arctic that no one ever thought would be accessible. This includes a certain pair of brothers that are highly invested in carbon based energy and fund much if not all of the deniers making plans to drill and tap that oil when the ice melts permanently.

It's sad but I don't think the US will change course on climate change until it's far to late to matter. I'd like to see the construction of 1000 nuclear reactors in the US and a shutdown of most of the coal power plants along with increased gas prices that drive the adoption of electric vehicles. The gas will likely happen on it's own anyway but coal won't stop without outside forces because the US has so much of it.

Nobody presented it as proof of AWG. It says so in the goddamned summary.

Wait, AWG? I don't think the American Wire Gauge is in dispute here.

It's a pain in the fucking ass. Now we've got AWG and metric cable types. I'm supposed to be able to find a substitute for a discontinued cable, specs in AWG, but replacements in metric, and every. single. fucking. time. I have to work out the characteristics because the sizes aren't exactly the same.

"But Beardo, why not just use the next biggest size and leave the conversion to the philosophers?"

"It's a pain in the fucking ass. Now we've got AWG and metric cable types. I'm supposed to be able to find a substitute for a discontinued cable, specs in AWG, but replacements in metric, and every. single. fucking. time. I have to work out the characteristics because the sizes aren't exactly the same."

Two, over 80% of Alaskans believe climate change is happening, and over 55% believe it's human caused. I'm pretty sure those are both the highest for any "red" state. Why? We've warmed 3.0 degrees (C) in the last 50 years, which is more than a little insane. We (not me personally, I've only been here a few years) have watched it happen. Yes, this year, was a little bit below normal, mostly driven by interior regions (Fairbanks), while the coast, especially the north coast, was still above normal.

But don't worry, I'm sure they'll be able to remove the "contiguous" qualifier soon enough. For instance, every day in April, save one, was above-normal. But I'm sure that won't change what you believe either.

Again how is more snow show that the warming trend is wrong? Snow is a product of moisture in the atmosphere not the temperature (unless it rises above say around 38 degrees). I would argue that more moisture is a product of warmer temperatures due to evaporation.

So I am wrong, care to educate me, o' weather scientist. Are you saying moisture density in the air is not increased by heat? And why would it have to be colder for more snow. I find that snow is more likely to fall closer to the freezing point, in fact the temperature generally rises when it snows.Basically what I am saying is it can get too cold to snow (well not really but the probability the conditions for snow are vastly reduced), below 0F you really don't get much precipitation. Snow requires a few things to occur before you see those white flakes. 1 Moisture saturation, the more moisture in the air means the higher probability of snow, 2. Temperature, must allow the ice crystals to stay frozen on their way down, 3 a temperature difference between the lower atmosphere and the area where snow develops. On really cold days there is not enough heat to drive the saturated air to the very cold layers of the atmosphere where snow forms

Every year it snows the most when the high is around 20 degrees or so. The cold cold cold days are clear and windy.

Being from Wisconsin, I have to agree that the warmer winters tend to have the most snow. Cold winters tend to have the most accumulation while warmer winters tend to have the most precipitation. Once you get below 10f, the chance of snow drops dramatically. Below 0f will give you a very clear sky and snow almost never falls when the temp is below 0f.

You've never heard of 'dew point', have you? It depends entirely on 2 variables, temprature and pressure. I'd say you just made a complete fool of yourself by telling the world you have no idea what causes rain, but that's not uncommon in AGW threads..

That is *exactly* the case, but we're talking about temperatures at the point where the phase change occurs, not the local weather.

Water evaporates faster the warmer it is - warm air heats the surface and speeds the process. Warmer air can also hold more water as water vapor, which is why 70% humidity in the dead of winter is actually still fairly dry air while 70% humidity during a heat wave is oppressively wet.

Clouds form when a body of that warm, moist air (a warm front) collides with a body of cold air

Except snow doesn't form down here, it forms high up in the atmosphere, to get that water up there you have to have heat to drive the saturated air up. Notice it snows far heavier on the warmer winter days. Once the temp drops well below freezing the chances of snow are greatly reduced.

Ok read your article. It seems the primary reason for the increased ice in the Bering sea as compared the rest of the arctic, which has seen a decline in sea ice coverage, was due to winds blowing the ice down to the Bering strait where it backed up until the ice wall finally collapsed and the ice then flowed into the Bering sea while the low temperatures helped keep it frozen.

Not sure what point you are trying to make with it, as it even mentions the record highs in the continental US.

How is it inconvenient for the pro-science group? The increased snowfall (and the warmth of the contiguous states) has a known cause - the change in the jet stream. And the change in the jet stream has a known cause - a change in the arctic oscillation. And climate theory indicates that one of the things that happens when you lose the summer arctic ice cover is that the arctic oscillation changes. And what has been causing the summer arctic ice cover to disappear? Global warming. So, while this doesn'

Do you have a link for that somewhere? I will have to listen to some folks in some other forums tooting their horn as they jump up and down in joy over this news, and I'd like to temper their excitement.

Actually, La Nina years do depress the global atmosphere average temperature by pushing heat down into the ocean. El Nino years do the opposite, they pull heat up from the oceans and increase global average temperature. The effect is small (about 0.04C for each) but when El Nino and La Nina conditions are taken into account, it creates a much clearer picture of the earth's warming trends [skepticalscience.com].

Let's compare all those highly-accurate satellite temperature measurements with the satellite data from only 200 years ago when Ben Franklin lofted the first earth observing satellite.... oh, wait,....nope.... I guess we have no such data. Oh, alright, lets use the highly-calibrated thermometer data from way back 200 years ago when some sea captain measured the temperature somewhere (plus or minus 200 miles from a point in the mid-Atlantic) using his very accurate mercury thermometer that was carefully calibrated to the NIST standards.... oh, wait, nope.... no such traceable calibration and the candle-light made reading that thermometer within 1/10th of a degree relative to a scratch in the brass frame a bit tough.... not to mention that the guy was tired and did not see any reason to worry too much about being too precise...

That was not working too well... let's use the hyper-accurate temperature measuring device all Americans prefer to use when they can afford it: tree rings. Yes, a thermometer from 200 years ago has a few calibration issues and the satellites were not very good 200 years ago, but everybody who believes in science knows that a tree ring or some muck from the bottom of a river is accurate to within 1% of a degree! Why, I for one, chop down a tree and check the tree rings for every morning....why bother with a thermometer when an axe and a precise temperature tree are available?

All the hype about "record" and "all-time" high or low temp data is manipulative and speculative. There were no humans (not scientists, nor even amateurs) taking and recording temperature data on 80% of the North American continent before 300 years ago, and the planet is at least 6000 years old (Grin) so we are statistically blind to most of the temperatures for world history. If you plug-in the actual age of the Earth, you know that we know, with calibrated precision, next to nothing about the long-term "global temperature". Comparing data from highly-accurate, calibrated and traceable, modern scientific instruments to creative and imaginative speculation about past temperatures is extremely dishonest and anti-science, but a great way to write a paper and get more taxpayer funds for another year of "research", which beats the hell out of flipping burgers

I'm no luddite... I used to design and build scientific instruments and now work in aerospace, but I am outraged but the so-called scientific climate studies that are done by people who have (and I will be charitable here) apparently forgotten some of the most-basic rules of science in order to score political points or stay popular with their peers. Rules like:

1. Different data sets measured two different ways with two different types of instrument cannot be honestly compared without a common calibration.

2. Data collected with two identical instruments still cannot be compared if one of them lacks traceable calibration

3. You can never gain absolute precision by using additional imprecise data. (in other words: if you sum-average or in other ways lump-together a bunch of data that is accurate to 1 percent, you may get a more-precise idea of what your imprecise measuring device thought it saw, but you have absolutely not obtained a better-than 1 percent measurement of what was actually there... and such data manglng actually reduces absolute precision)

They used to teach this stuff in first-year science classes several decades ago...

You are a luddite when it comes to climate science. Or science in general since your arguments wouldn't even stand up to the most basic scrutiny of a peer-review.

How about you take your clearly superior intelligence and read up on the subject. You can start with the IPCC report which explains the research very well in laymen's terms. After that, you can read the thousands of referenced scientific papers on the subject.

Or if that's too much, you could go ahead and write a paper without doing any background research that explains the current observations without using AGW. Submit it and win a Nobel (assuming your paper doesn't get absolutely destroyed for the child-like logic you use here). That's a cool million for you right there for the taking. Easy as pie.

Global warming isn't some new theory someone pulled out of their ass a couple years ago. It's over 120 years old. Scientists have been predicting a warming world due to increases in greenhouse gases since before the computer was invented. So if you can come up with a plausible theory that explains how all the current science was built on nonsense you'd be the scientific equivalent of Einstein.

Many, many fake skeptics have questioned the positioning of the sensors. In fact, some have put together a study of that and the data they found was that there was a problem with the sensors - there was a slight bias to underreport the warming. It wasn't for all the sensors and it wasn't a large amount, but it showed that the sensors did not make things seem warmer than they really are. In addition, a number of studies have shown that the positioning of the sensors isn't really affecting the trends. In

As your link says, we have ice-core data [wikipedia.org] going back up to about 750,000 years. This gives CO2 and temperature readings for the last 8 ice ages. Over this period CO2 has varied between about 180 and 300 ppm [wikipedia.org].

Currently, CO2 is at about 390 ppm [wikipedia.org], significantly higher than at any point in at least the last 750,000 years. Since CO2 drives temperature, we can expect global temperatures to rise to higher than at any point in the last 750,000 years.

You can see that global CO2 levels rise fairly evenly, with Antarctica only lagging the Northern Hemisphere by a few years. Over the time scales involved in the ice cores this lag would be invisible. Also note the scale: it's 360 to 390 ppm, so although the colours look dramatic, the differences being shown are mostly less than 10% of the total and roughly equal to the annual variation.

Your assumption would be incorrect. Natural variability means that short term temperature variations occur. A true measure of the temperature of the Earth would look not only at atmospheric temperatures but ocean temperatures as well (and even land temperatures). On average about 90% of the warming that occurs each year goes into the oceans. But cycles such as El Nino/La Nina cause large transfers of energy between the oceans and the atmosphere so in the short term the atmosphere can cool. A recent sta